Has Your Web Development Team Made Your Site Able To Handle A Traffic Surge?

Have you ever been watching television and been told about this great new website only to see an error message when you type it into your browser? Or been perusing Facebook and seen a link to a site that a friend thinks everyone should check out only to be told that the “server resources might have been exceeded”? This is a result of the website being unable to handle a traffic surge.

If you are unsure whether your website is able to withstand a sudden surge in traffic, you should speak with your web development team to find out what they are doing about it. There are actually two ways that you can ensure that your website will not crash:

Choose a suitable host
Make sure that the hosting package you choose for your website is suitable for your needs. There is no such thing as an ‘unlimited package’ – there will always be a cap on the resources that you can use.

Optimise your site to use fewer resources
Make sure that your web development team has optimised the website in a way that does not put undue stress on the server. You should try caching, compression, limit database queries and optimizing images.

Ultimately, you never know when your website will receive an unexpected traffic surge, which is why your web development team needs to make sure that they are prepared for a special mention on television or a share on Facebook. What use is all that free advertising if your site is going to go down the moment 20 people try to jump onto it all at once?